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Nov. 13, 2023 - Firebrand - Matt Gaetz
33:06
Episode 131 LIVE: The Ladder CR – Firebrand with Matt Gaetz
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Thank you.
You're not taking Matt Gaetz off the board, okay?
Because Matt Gaetz is an American patriot and Matt Gaetz is an American hero.
We will not continue to allow the Uniparty to run this town without a fight.
I want to thank you, Matt Gates, for holding the line.
Matt Gates is a courageous man.
If we had hundreds of Matt Gates in D.C., the country turns around.
It's that simple.
He's so tough, he's so strong, he's smart, and he loves this country.
Matt Gates.
It is the honor of my life to fight alongside each and every one of you.
We will save America.
It's choose your fighter time.
I'm sending the Firebrands. - Welcome back to Firebrand.
We are broadcasting from a chilly...
Room 2021 in the Rayburn House office building here in our Capitol Complex in Washington, D.C. It is not like my beloved Florida up here.
But we've got a lot to discuss.
Government funding.
There's been an injunction issued against the pistol brace rule.
And Washington, D.C. has gotten so crazy, even the Secret Service is having to endure the scourge of crime and carjackings because there are no consequences in Washington for criminal behavior.
But first, let's get to this concept of the latter CR. You may have heard House Speaker Mike Johnson talk about it, folks report on it.
What does it mean?
What's coming to the floor?
What are we like?
What are we not like?
So, for context, House Speaker Johnson has been on the job for a few weeks, and government funding runs out in a few days.
So right now, he's asking for support for a CR, or continuing resolution.
We oppose continuing resolutions.
Each agency of government should get itemized review.
Spending cannot be cut if we advance all of the government's various and sundry programs all at once for the same duration of time.
So, Speaker Johnson's latter CR fails to meet the mark in this respect.
It doesn't cut spending.
It doesn't set the Republican-controlled House up for a win or even to engage in a single policy fight.
It's more of Pelosi's policies and Biden's spending.
It also lashes the important but totally unrelated farm bill extender to the funding legislation for the rest of government.
And it does the farm bill extender through the end of September.
Now, I think we need a farm bill.
I think that farmers and food security create national security.
They give us the ability for national self-determination.
Economic nationalists should be for America's farmers.
But if there's money we're spending on the farm bill, it should be offset with spending reductions elsewhere.
Now, it's just not right to slap an extender for the farm bill onto this continuing resolution.
That's the bad in the latter CR. And it's dispositively bad.
But there is some creativity in the latter concept that I do support, as I explained to CNN here.
On the CR, I presume you support this laddered CR approach.
Is that right?
If the Speaker goes a different route, what would you do?
So, the concept that we discussed today with the Speaker is exciting because it breaks us from this theory that you have to take one vote on all of government To extend every agency for precisely the same duration of time.
I think we can be more specific in the timelines and in the approaches.
That's why I'm for single subject spending bills.
If we're able to get these bills we're working on this week passed, you're looking at around 80% of the federal budget that the House has approved funding for.
But the Senate wants to always take up everything all at once for the same duration of time.
The laddered approach that Speaker Johnson was socializing with members today, I think, gives us a lot of innovative opportunity to put downward pressure on spending.
If it goes with a clean CR, then what?
I'm not voting for a clean CR. Will it cost him the speakership if he does that?
Well, he never promised me he would, unlike the last guy.
And remember, there's a big difference, right?
Kevin McCarthy never wanted to get to single subject spending bills.
You know how your viewers can take great confidence in that?
He only passed one in the first seven months.
Mike Johnson passed one in the first 36 hours, and we've been rolling through them.
So I think there is a willingness to give a little more grace to Speaker Johnson than to Speaker McCarthy, because he was fiddling as Rome was burning.
I think Mike Johnson is trying to build us on a path to more fiscal sanity, and we want to support him in those efforts.
We are back live and the overwhelming sentiment from the comments on the live stream is that we should not have a government funding bill that does not secure the border.
It should be either secure the border or shut down the government according to the overwhelming sentiment that we are receiving.
But follow me here on the ladder concept.
So a ladder concept that is clean is a bad idea because it doesn't sufficiently do the border work that we've been talking about and it doesn't sufficiently cut spending.
But the ladder itself isn't bad.
You see, The concept that we are fighting against is this notion that all of government gets voted on all at once for one big up or down vote.
To extend every agency for the same duration of time.
With a ladder, the good news is that you're able to cleave the important stuff that we all agree on that's bipartisan.
Paying our troops, paying our border patrol...
Ensuring that people still get their IRS refunds and their Social Security checks.
You do that and then you set on shorter ladders different features of government that have to have itemized review.
I'm thinking notably the DOJ, a lot of the parts of the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of State.
You set those on shorter ladders and then you're able to really zero in on what those entities of government are doing.
So a ladder is good, a ladder without the spending cuts, without the border stuff, without defanging the weaponization of government, not sufficient at this time.
And certainly the addition of the farm bill extender puts us in, I think, a real bad stead when trying to get to single-subject spending bills.
One reason this is so important, we've just gotten fresh off of a report from House Budget Committee Chairman Jody Arrington, A ratings change from Moody's Investor Services.
This from New York on November 10th.
Moody's today has changed the outlook on the government of the United States of America's rating to negative from stable and affirmed the long-term issuer of senior unsecured ratings at AAA. The key driver of the outlook change to negative is Moody's assessment that the downside risks to the U.S. fiscal strength have increased significantly We're good
to go.
The sharp rise in U.S. Treasury bond yields this year has increased the pre-existing pressure on U.S. debt affordability.
In the absence of policy action, Moody's expects the U.S. debt affordability to decline further, steadily, and significantly to very weak levels compared to other highly rated sovereigns.
This is a major downgrade.
Moody has taken the United States of America from stable to negative.
And the reason is because we don't have our fiscal house in order.
Because our debt is going to become increasingly unaffordable.
We're going to be paying a trillion dollars in interest on the debt.
We're already over $900 billion.
We're under $900 billion for the whole Department of Defense budget.
These are devastating consequences at a time when, of this $33 trillion in debt, we're going to have to refinance that debt at higher and higher interest rates because of the government spending, because of the Biden inflation, because of the decisions from the Fed.
So this makes life unaffordable.
It makes borrowing money impossible.
When America as a whole is seeing this downgrade as a consequence of our inability to constrain spending, Mr. Speaker, we must cut spending.
It is not enough to slow the rate of growth.
We have to cut spending and we see that we will pass along a diminished America if we're unable to achieve that.
There's another story that I have to reflect on.
Over the weekend, former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy had a therapy session with CNN reporter Manu Raju that was videotaped and then published on CNN's Sunday program.
And like in many therapy sessions, the former speaker had a lot of things to say about people who he thought were mean to him.
Take a listen.
If you ever listen to Vern Buchanan, when Matt came into office, Vern is the Dean of Florida.
And he went around with each person, what would you like to achieve to help him?
And people would talk about things in their district of what they wanted to achieve.
Matt's goal was, his goal was to be the TV congressman.
And they came back and they kind of laughed and said, is that seriously what you want to be?
He said, yeah, the TV congressman.
That's what he wants to be known for.
I think Congress is too important and the issues are too big.
To focus on such small things that Matt tries to.
It's more a division, and it's focused on himself.
That was former Speaker McCarthy, who has done considerably more television interviews than I have.
Matter of fact, he was the TV speaker in the absence of substance.
And you will recall, on this program, time and again, I said that whether or not McCarthy faced removal was entirely within his hands.
All he had to do was comply with the agreement that he made with House conservatives in January.
He chose not to do that and now believes that his removal was a consequence of television, Or worse, take a listen to this alt-explanation from the removed former Speaker.
Those eight members who you referred to as the Crazy Eights and the like, after you, they elected Speaker Johnson, they were crowing about this.
What did you think about that?
Well, just from a From a serious point of understanding governing, look, I'm a conservative who loves to govern.
I don't believe them to be conservatives.
There's a different rationale.
It's driven by Gates, who it was all based upon an ethics complaint that happened in the last Congress.
He would throw his country away to try to protect himself from what would come out as the truth.
For those others to go along, I don't quite understand.
I think it's more personal.
If the ethics committee never does anything to Gates, then Gates was successful in stopping probably what rightfully should come to him.
But going through the three weeks and then taking down Steve Scalise, Jim Jordan, Tom Emmer, all people who are really prepared to do the job, that was frustrating for me.
We are back live and it is hard to ever present to you a clip that would have more projection than what we just showed from Speaker McCarthy.
Let's start with this assessment that it was the conference that took down Steve Scalise and Jim Jordan and Tom Emmer.
Steve Scalise knows that it was Kevin McCarthy who blocked him.
That's why Steve Scalise did so much, to ensure that we were able to elect Mike Johnson, even though Kevin McCarthy was attempting a comeback.
So, Emmer, Jordan, Scalise, you see, it didn't matter who it was, and it didn't matter what the ideology was, conservative, moderate, liberal, conservative.
McCarthy was just working to try to sabotage everyone, and he couldn't figure out a way to sabotage Mike Johnson.
And then he says this is all about some sort of ethics issue that I have.
I'm just an ethically challenged person.
It's not that Kevin couldn't keep his deal.
Well, what's the explanation for everyone else then?
Did the seven other people who voted with me also have ethics problems when we removed McCarthy?
Or how about in the final vote?
Before Mike Johnson was ultimately designated.
When Kevin McCarthy had done everything to summon his lieutenants and marshal the last bit of loyalty people might feel to him for all the special interest money he distributed to them.
And McCarthy got 43 votes.
So the 150 plus other members of the House Republican Conference in the final stead refused to back Kevin McCarthy.
I don't believe all of them had challenges with ethics.
I think it was McCarthy's Own ethical problems that led to his downfall because the guy couldn't tell the truth.
And he went and squawked on in this therapy session about how Nancy Pelosi had let him down and she promised him he would never do this.
Kevin McCarthy couldn't tell the truth.
And because of that, no one trusted him and a sufficient number of people were willing to remove him.
And now we must move forward.
So I know that in the stages of grief there's denial, anger, bargaining, depression, grief, you know.
I think we're in anger now.
We had to get past denial.
There's big news for gun owners that I want to report to you, and as you recall, we've been fighting against this unlawful, unconstitutional pistol-brace ban that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms has put into place in the absence of any Law passed by the representatives and signed by the executive.
I pointed out how pistol braces were not in any way dangerous to regular folks in this recent hearing before the House Judiciary Committee.
Take a listen.
Another area is this issue of the arm braces.
Now in Mr. Wilcox's testimony, he says that an arm brace makes a weapon more powerful.
Mr. Bosco, you know a lot about arm braces, don't you?
I do.
Do arm braces make firearms more powerful?
They do not.
They do not.
Does it concern you that the witness that the Democrats brought would make such a claim that is obviously disproven by any utilization of those arm braces?
I hope that my testimony today can help everyone here understand that the brace does nothing to make the weapon any more dangerous than it already is.
And so, when you've got the ATF going beyond their authority, collecting 252 million records that they have to destroy, well, that can just be explained because they're doing their best.
But when Americans get inadvertently converted to felons because the ATF has exceeded their authority, there is no such grace for them as their miswear.
That would seem to be the case under the recent policy change to zero tolerance.
Zero tolerance for our fellow Americans when they're trying to exercise their rights and protect their liberties, but all the tolerance in the world for a corrupt bureaucracy that is violating the law, exceeding their authority, and collecting records that they have no business collecting.
We're back live.
So we had that hearing with some of these folks that talk about the pistol brace rule.
And we now get this report from Breitbart.
Federal judge blocks ATF's pistol brace rule, describes it as unlawful.
Judge Matthew J. Kaczmarek put a preliminary injunction in place against the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.
They deemed the rule unlawful.
One of the plaintiffs in the case is Gabriel Chouster, who deployed overseas in the War on Terror, was ambushed in Minneapolis and shot 15 times, then spent 85 days in the hospital.
He uses a stabilizer brace to help him shoot his gun.
Another plaintiff, Sean Kroll, is big into recreation and self-defense.
He uses a stabilizing brace because it makes his firearm safer.
This case is Brito, B-R-I-T-T-O, versus ATF.
It is currently in the Northern District of Texas.
The temporary injunction means that the plaintiffs have a substantial likelihood of success on the merits.
It means that they will suffer irreparable harm in the absence of this injunction being issued, that there is no adequate remedy that they could ever get back in terms of money damages, and that it serves public policy interests.
Those are the elements to get temporary injunctive relief at this stage of the litigation.
They have achieved that.
I'm sure that will be on appeal, but the fact that we've got this Texas federal judge saying that this is an unlawful application of this pistol brace rule against these particular plaintiffs, great news, and hopefully that jurisprudence will persist as our oversight work persists on this very issue.
We also have an interesting story about our nation's capital.
We've been detailing to you the decaying conditions here, the rampant homelessness and crime and just debauchery that seems to be at the envelope of this great celebration of America that our capital ought to be.
But we now know that Secret Service agents protecting President Joe Biden's granddaughter had to open fire after three people tried to break into an unmarked Secret Service vehicle here in Washington, D.C. So the Secret Service agents assigned to protect Naomi Biden were out with her in a Georgetown neighborhood Late on Sunday night.
And again, Georgetown is like the nicest part of Washington.
And one of the agents opened fire.
No one was struck by the gunfire.
But three suspects were seen fleeing a red car.
They were trying to break into it, presumably.
Now, Washington has seen a significant rise in the number of carjackings and car thefts just this year.
As of October 28th, D.C. police say there have been 821 carjackings reported in the district this year.
That's compared to 395 this time last year.
It is a 108% increase.
Car thefts in general are also up dramatically.
101% increase while violent crime has increased by 41% here in Washington, D.C. It's truly something that we've got to grapple with.
And Congress may have to step in.
We've got the ability to constrain the home rule of the city council here when they pass these soft on crime policies.
And so that Washington is safe for all of you when you come visit.
So it is a stunning representation of America's story as it should be.
We've got to get these things under control.
There's another...
I want to cover.
There's a lot of news right now about how some of these abortion referendums have been faring unfavorably.
I discussed that with Manu Raju, Sienna, and take a listen.
Ohio, this vote tonight, affirming abortion rights, the seventh state now to do that post-Roe.
Does that concern you about this issue and the saliency of this issue come 2024?
I think you're seeing voters react in the way a lot of legal scholars expected, by weighing in on the issue.
The fundamental problem with Roe, in addition to the science being wrong, is that this notion that you were going to have judges ultimately make that decision was...
It was not sustainable.
So, look, it's not the way I would have voted.
It's not the policy choice I would personally make, but I have no doubt that lawmakers in Ohio will respect the decision of the voters, just like in Kansas and in the other places where they've had these ballot provisions.
I guess politically, are you concerned about being on the wrong side of public opinion on this issue?
Well, I'm not concerned about it.
The voters I represent are pretty pro-life.
And I think that's true for a lot of Republican congressmen.
But I do think that we've got members in swing districts who are going to have to really refine their thinking on this.
And for some, that means federal floor.
And then flexibility for states to be able to react and for others it's entirely a state issue.
For me, I think it's pretty fundamental for the federal government to respect life in all forms and that's why I'm a pro-life congressman.
We're back live and indeed the people of northwest Florida are pro-life.
It says a lot about our nation, how we stand for the liberty interests of the unborn and I will continue to do that.
Whenever Firebrand is mentioned in the mainstream media, even the liberal media outlets that hate us, I like to sometimes give you a perspective on how they write about the show and think about the show as we give you direct updates regarding what's going on in Washington, D.C. and why it's happening.
So Raw Story is a left-wing website.
I would typically not trust them on any real fact.
Indeed, this piece that I'm going to share with you is an opinion piece of theirs, and it is styled, The GOP Civil War is Apparently Now Cleaning Out Closets.
I'm reading now from the piece.
But unlike most Republicans in the House, oh, I'm sorry, just for context, this is a piece that goes over the segment that we did about House Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith when Congressman Smith was attacking me for lying.
And I pointed out that Jason Smith is the last person in the world who should be attacking anyone for lying.
So here's what the piece says.
Unlike most Republicans in the House, Smith is 44 and single.
And one of his closest friends in Congress for years, someone he traveled with on lavish trips, was none other than Illinois Congressman Aaron Schock.
The closeted gay House member who resigned in 2015 amid a scandal that focused on his outrageous misuse of government funds and eventually was indicted in 2016 for fraud and theft of government funds, among other charges.
Attention was brought to their relationship when the spotlight focused on the luxurious trips Shock was taking, often spending taxpayer dollars.
As reported by The Hill in 2018, Representative Jason Smith, Republican of Missouri, joined his close friend Aaron Schock on campaign and government trips and exotic vacations in 2014 that were begun by being scrutinized by federal investigators looking into the alleged spending abuses by the former congressman who resigned.
Revelations that Smith accompanied Schock on the campaign trip Came as well.
The Hill reported that Smith has hired Shock's former chief of staff, Mark Roman, who managed the congressman's office at the time of the spending scandal.
There's no indication that federal prosecutors have questioned or sought records from Smith, but his participation on trips now under criminal investigation could drag one of Shock's closest friends in Congress into his legal mess and undermine Smith's political image as a humble, salt-of-the-earth fiscal conservative.
The news has also led to chatter on Capitol Hill, where Romans hiring by Smith surprised many.
The story also reported on a trip that Smith took with shock to Brazil, along with two other House members, most of which was paid for by the Brazilian government.
But after the official business, the Hill reports, shock, Smith, and several of their male aides headed to the Brazilian beach town of Canoa, Cabedara, a gay-friendly resort spot.
Smith and Schock also went to Argentina with their aides.
The Hill now reported on how unusual it was for members to take their aides on lavish vacations.
Later that December, Schock posted Instagram photos of himself, Smith, Roman, and Schock's photographer, Jonathan Link, hanging out at a vineyard in the famed Mendoza wine region of Argentina and whitewater rafting.
Some GOP aides said it was odd for lawmakers to be taking their staff on exotic vacations.
As one noted, one of the aides on both the Brazil trip and the Argentina trip was Roman, who as The Hill reports, many were surprised Smith hired as his chief of staff since he was managing shocks during the time of the spending scandal.
Roman has now moved up from being Smith's chief of staff to being the staff director of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, which Smith chairs.
Quite something.
Raw story reporting on these two guys being buddies, shock having all these problems about how money was being spent, leaves They all went on vacation with their aides together to all these interesting places.
And then Smith hires the guy who oversaw the office that had the spending problems, makes him his chief of staff, same guy he was in all these pictures with on all these exotic vacations, and then makes him staff director of the House Ways and Means Committee.
Quite something.
We end our report to you today with sad news.
Five service members have been killed in a training crash.
The Department of Defense has identified the service members who passed away on November 10, 2023, in what the Pentagon has described as a helicopter refueling training exercise in the Eastern Mediterranean.
And we want everyone to know that our condolences go out to the families of Chief Warrant Officer Stephen R. Dwyer of Clarksville, Tennessee.
He was 38 years old.
Chief Warrant Officer Shane Barnes, 34, of Sacramento, California.
And Staff Sergeant Tanner W. Grone, 26, of New Hampshire.
Also, Andrew Sutherland of Apache Junction, Arizona.
Cade Wolf, 24, of Monotoco, Minnesota.
Certainly never in the field of human conflict was so much owed so many to so few.
That from Winston Churchill and certainly something on our minds as we think about those five patriots, those five heroes, their families, and all who cared about them and loved them.
Make sure you're subscribed to our program with your notifications turned on so that you get news coming out as we proceed on these government funding battles, on these battles against Washington corruption, and certainly battles for our service members and those who enjoy their Second Amendment rights.
Appreciate you being here.
Roll the credits.
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